# Shadow City: Blood & Neon tags: #game/rpg/shadow-city ![[Shadow City (cover).jpg|600]] **Shadow City: Blood & Neon** is Greg Christopher's — the "[Chubby Funster](https://x.com/ChubbyFunsterGC)" — pitch for urban vampires that never read the memo about brooding elegantly for four centuries. It takes the neon-lit, freshly digital 1981 streets you'd actually want to play in and runs them through the lean and lethal chassis of **[[ShadowDark]]**: a **[[Vampire - the Masquerade|Vampire: the Masquerade]]** for the old-school crowd, if the World of Darkness had been sharpened to a single 238-page book and the entire metaplot set alight. You are a dead thing in a city that is alive and packed with things bigger than you. Werewolves, faeries, and worse stalk the same gutters. You will fight for every scrap of territory, every dollar, every last drink of blood — and the mortal world is one year closer to finding you out every time the calendar turns. It's the Lost Boys by way of the Sopranos with a splash of Saints Row: hungry, broke, and running out of night. ## Setting The year is 1981. Digital technology is revolutionizing communications, music, fashion, and film are all climbing, and down in the glow behind them, crime, drugs, violence, and espionage are blooming. You are a vampire in the shadow of that boom, drinking the blood of mortals and trying to survive a brave new world. The game's high-octane loop trades **ShadowDark**'s dwindling torchlight for something nastier: instead of the flame running out, it's the relentless mortal world getting one step closer to your secrets — no centuries of courtly intrigue, no sitting pretty. You might not survive the first night. The city is **Shadow City**, a fictional metropolis generated fresh — randomly or by intent — and split into ten or more neighborhoods of six to eight 1-mile hexes, each with its own points of interest, danger level, and resident supernatural powers. Vampires are powerful, but they are not alone, and they are not in charge. The theme line says it all: *the city is alive, and you are dead.* ## Mechanics The engine is **ShadowDark**'s, tuned for the night. Most actions are a **d20** plus a stat modifier against a **Difficulty Class**, and the four benchmarks carry over — Easy 9, Normal 12, Hard 15, Extreme 18. **Advantage** and **disadvantage** roll two dice and keep the better or worse. Your stats are the six the game actually uses: **Awareness, Cognition, Magnetism, Physique, Quickness, and Willpower**, ranging 3–18 with modifiers from −4 to +5. There's no skill list; the GM picks a stat, sets a DC, and the book tells them to move on. ### Blood, Hunger, and the Beast Every vampire runs on **hit points (HP)**, the body's ability to take damage, and **blood points (BP)**, the reservoir of stored blood inside it. You spend BP to heal and to fuel **Disciplines** — and as your pool drops you get more primal, until you can no longer contain *the beast* in your heart. **Frenzy** is the engine of that danger. Drop to zero BP, or roll a natural 1 while under half, and you must make a willpower check to hold it back (DC 10 − level). Spend yourself below half BP and you check again (DC 5 + total BP expended that night). Fail and you're in a frenzy, compelled to feed on the nearest mortal until you're full or they're dead — from a *living* mortal's neck specifically; stored blood won't satisfy it. When the frenzy passes, you roll a new **compulsion**, and if you land the same one you check for a lasting **derangement** (schizophrenia, paranoia, multiple personalities, a screaming fit that brings the police down on you — twelve flavors of "this is who you've become"). **Hunting** is its own little minigame: stake out an entire hex, spend hours stalking, and make an awareness check against DC 10 (adding your invested hours up to +8) to find a mark. A natural 1 while hunting is a **violation** — your monstrous nature was observed. ### Humanity **Humanity** runs from −7 to +3 and starts at +0. You lose a point every time you level unless you can argue you've behaved yourself, and you lose one for every innocent you kill. It applies as a negative modifier to reaction checks — your descent into evil is visible to everyone you meet. But the inverse applies to attacks: the more of a monster you are, the better your instinctive capacity for violence. A vampire sitting at −3 humanity rolls reactions at −3 and swings at +3. Cross the line at −8 and the character sheet goes to the GM: you are lost to insatiable hunger and become a villain NPC. ### What Made You A character is a stack of deliberate horrors. Your **Bloodline** is the power you inherited from the vampire who made you (d6: **Bestial, Foreign, Lunatic, Radiant, Monster, Vagrant**). Your **class** is your chosen nocturnal lifestyle — **Autarch, Butcher, Expert, Luminary, Medium, or Shadow** — and each carries its own random progression of **Disciplines**, vampiric powers acquired as you gain levels. Around that spine hang **Assets** (d8: Ally, Contact, Herd, Influence, Refuge, Resources, Servants, Status — your social capital), **Touchstones** (mortal NPCs anchoring your grip on the living world; improving one's life earns you XP), a **Compulsion** (the strongest pull in your psyche), and a **Feeding Habit** (d12, from Assault down to Betrayal), which grants advantage on opposed rolls whenever you follow it. Starting characters are three to six months into their unlife, with 2d6 × $10 in their pockets and a street kit on their back. ### The City Is the Dungeon The hex map doubles as the dungeon map. Time flows in **hours** as you drift around the city — catch a taxi for about $5, socialize, scout, pick pockets — and drops to **rounds** the moment you enter a site or a fight. A **domain** is a stretch of turf you claim exclusive feeding rights over; linger in another vampire's domain and that's trespassing. Control a **neighborhood** by securing its points of interest and patrolling every hex every night (awareness checks against encroaching threats), and you can spend an hour each night to draw BP straight from the land without a hunting check — but control attracts rivals, ghouls and thralls become necessary to hold it, and the GM is encouraged to threaten whatever you build. Danger levels ride on top: Safe, Unsafe, Risky, Deadly, each dictating how often a d6 encounter check rolls in. Then there's the clock nobody wants to watch. Exposure is tracked through **violations**, each one requiring a cover-up paid in cash and escalating in cost from a hundred dollars to a hundred thousand. Leave one unburied and the number of exposed mortals doubles every day. If the exposed count crosses 10,000 — or five years simply pass — the **apocalypse counter** ticks up, and at 10 the mortal world rises as one and wipes out every vampire. Greed and survival are the same sentence. ### Progression **XP** comes from acquiring valuables and relics, from making a positive impact on a touchstone's life, from draining a rival vampire to final death, and from grinding. You gain a level when you earn your current level × 10 XP (LV2 needs 10, LV10 needs 90), the total resets, and you pick up +2 HP and a roll toward your max BP. **Grinding** is a deliberate time-skip of about three months — everyone must be at full BP and the coterie has to pool at least $1,000 — during which each PC picks a focus (Connections, Purification, Rumination, Self-Control, Self-Improvement, or Vigilance) and rolls 1d4 plus a contribution bonus for the payoff: XP, humanity, luck tokens, even a permanent +2 to max BP and HP. But every grind moves you one step closer to the apocalypse counter. Nothing is free, least of all time. ## Editions - **Shadow City: Blood & Neon (2025)** — the standalone core book, written and designed by Greg Christopher (Chubby Funster) and published under the **ShadowDark** RPG Third-Party License, version 1.0. Kickstarter-funded in the summer of 2025 and released to DriveThruRPG that September; 238 pages. *(In the library: the core rulebook plus the official character sheet, city map, and prefab/prebuilt packs.)* ## References - [ShadowCity: Blood and Neon - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/521203/shadowcity-blood-and-neon) - [ShadowCity: Blood and Neon - Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chubbyfunster/shadowcity-blood-and-neon) - [ShadowCity: Blood & Neon - Review (Tabletop Thoughts)](https://tabletop-thoughts.com/2026/02/20/shadowcity-review-vampires-in-the-streets-blood-in-the-dark/) - [ShadowCity Discussion and News - Reddit (r/osr)](https://www.reddit.com/r/shadowdark/comments/1md8v8f/shadowcity/)